Master Archaeologist

Chapter 366 Maqiao Culture
From the Zhou Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty, no one seemed to live in the C-shaped plain where Liangzhu was located.

The sixth cultural layer below the cultural layer of the Zhou Dynasty also came to the Maqiao cultural layer.

This layer is yellow-brown soil, containing more yellow sandstone particles and a small amount of charcoal, with a rough structure.

Sand-filled red and brown Jomon pottery pieces and imprinted hard pottery pieces were unearthed. The identifiable shapes of the utensils include sandy red pottery tripod, sandy red pottery pot, stone axes, stone arrowheads, whetstones, etc., and a small amount of stone materials.

The Maqiao Culture was named after this type of relic was first discovered in the middle layer of the Maqiao site in Shanghai, and it was named Maqiao Culture in 1982.

In terms of age, the Maqiao Culture was closely followed by the Liangzhu Culture, but the cultural outlook was completely different.

There is no direct inheritance relationship between the two.

The Maqiao Culture inherited a small amount of cultural elements from the Liangzhu Culture, and the entire Liangzhu Culture did not dominate the Maqiao Culture.

The research results show that the Maqiao culture originated from the primitive culture of the mountains in southwestern Zhejiang, and it also includes elements of the Yueshi culture in Shandong and the Erlitou culture in the Central Plains.

Comparing the dynastic sequence in the Central Plains, the age of the Maqiao Culture is roughly equivalent to that of the Xia and Shang in the Central Plains.

After all, whether it was Xia or Shang, their core ruling areas did not include the Jianghuai region, which was still occupied by the Huaiyi and the barbarians in the south at that time.

Under the sixth floor, there are a small number of relics from the Maqiao Culture and Liangzhu Culture, mainly concentrated in the west of Tangou.

The middle and eastern part of the trench is the accumulation layer of the dam body.

After digging here, the dam body can already be seen.

According to different stacking methods, the dam body can be divided into upper and lower parts, the upper part is stacked in sections or blocks, and the lower part is stacked in layers.

What does that mean?

It is this dam that was not completed in one go. Instead, a platform foundation that may be four or five meters high was first piled up below, and then piled up section after section, and finally it was piled up into such a ten-meter-high platform. A dam several meters high.

As for why it was built 5000 years ago, Chen Han and the others can still see it.

Of course, it is because the soil and soil color used in different sections of the dam are different.

The stacking conditions of the top four sections are different from left to right.

The first section is yellow-brown clay with yellow and red clods. The soil is dense and pure, and the piles are relatively flat and lumpy, with a thickness of 1.2 to 1.7 meters.

The second section is reddish-brown clay with brown clods, less sand, and a small amount of charcoal. The soil is dense and lumpy, about 1.15 meters thick.

The third section is yellow-brown soil with a large amount of coarse sand and reddish-brown soil clods. The soil is relatively hard, thin in the west and thick in the east, and piled up in lumps, with a thickness of 0.5 to 1.2 meters.

The fourth stage is taupe clay with purple clods. The soil is dense and relatively pure, with massive accumulation, thin in the west and thick in the east, with a thickness of 0.18 to 0.5 meters.

Judging from the stacking situation, the soil blocks in this layer were piled inward from the east and west sides at the same time.

Any traces left by human activities or buildings can restore the original construction process through these traces.

Because as long as it is a human-made thing, the traces left are different at different times, different materials, and even different techniques.

Even just a little difference in the color of the soil layer and the difference in the materials used are enough for archaeologists to restore its original appearance.

However, this must be a professional soil structure, top experts in field archaeology can figure it out.

That is to say, Kong Jianwen and Professor Li can use the square shovel to study and draw lines on the section.

Chen Han and Zhuang Yunpeng are more doing another thing.

Organize the relics dug up during the trial.

Yes, as a 5000-year-old dam, during the process of digging trenches, it is inevitable that some relics of earlier times that were superimposed on the top of the dam will be dug out.

The ten-meter-long and four-meter-wide exploration trench, although the number of relics found is limited and the types are relatively simple, including ash pits, ash ditches, and a small number of post holes, which belong to the Liangzhu Culture, Maqiao Culture Period, and Tang Dynasty. Dynasties and Song Dynasty cultural relics.

However, the remains of the Liangzhu Culture and the Maqiao Culture can be said to be very important.

In the relics of Liangzhu culture, only one gray ditch was found, numbered T1G3.

The ash trench is located at the west end of the exploration trench T1, overlapping under the sixth floor.

After all, during the Liangzhu culture, this dam was still in use, and it is usually impossible for ordinary people to live at the location of the dam, so there is only one relic.

Moreover, this relic broke the dam body. It may be a relatively late Liangzhu relic. At that time, the dam may have been abandoned or no longer valued, so people were active on it.

However, there are few unearthed relics in this site. Chen Han and Zhuang Yunpeng cleaned up for a long time, and they also cleared out Shiyun field utensils, fin-shaped red pottery tripod legs with sand, side flat-shaped red pottery tripod legs, sandy gray pottery solid legs, Yuzu and so on.

The so-called "so-and-so foot" literally means that there are only fragments of the "foot" of a tripod or 盉, rather than a complete pottery that can be pieced together.

It is an irresponsible guess, maybe this dam was once regarded as a garbage dump by the people of Liangzhu at a certain period of time.

Broken, damaged, broken pottery was thrown here.

The recycle bin belongs to yes.

On the contrary, Lin Ya and several other colleagues from the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Social Sciences discovered a large number of Maqiao cultural relics.

Most of the relics of the Maqiao culture are on the fifth floor, and sometimes they break through the sixth floor.

Among the unearthed relics, there are a large number of pottery fragments.

What are clay yellow pottery pieces with diamond pattern, gray black pottery pieces and hard pottery pieces with plain sand and sand, sandy red pottery or black rope pattern pottery pieces, and hard pottery pieces with mat pattern, string pattern or plain surface, etc.

Generally speaking, most of the pottery pieces that can be identified are clay pots.

It can be seen that although the Maqiao culture is much later than the Liangzhu culture in terms of time, it is about the culture of the Xia and Shang Dynasties.

The development of its pottery is obviously much more monotonous, and basically the pottery used is mostly clay pots.

The pottery fragments unearthed from seven or eight Maqiao culture relics are all parts of pottery pots.

However, there is only one relic in Liangzhu, and there are pottery fragments of three kinds of utensils: tripod, 盉, and jar.

However, before this conclusion was over, Lin Ya successively discovered distinctive pottery tripod fragments and pottery pot fragments, breaking this conjecture.

The pottery culture of the Maqiao culture was not as backward as imagined.

Moreover, not only pottery fragments were unearthed from the Maqiao cultural relics, but also a relatively large number and variety of stone tools were unearthed.

Including axes, arrowheads, knives, modified stone tools, millstones, and primitive stone materials.

Both pottery and stone tools have been unearthed. It is basically certain that after the Liangzhu civilization perished, the plain where the ancient Liangzhu kingdom was located was moved southward from Shanghai to Maqiao after about 1000 years of power vacuum. Culture takes over.

(End of this chapter)